Two on Lawrence

BOOK REVIEWS Siegel concludes her study by considering the way in which women writers have reclaimed and used the trope of fluidity, focusing on Lawrence's The Virgin and the Gypsy and Eudora Weites "At the Landing." She places the metaphoric connection between women and water in a rich historical context, from Horace through Coleridge to Monique Wittig, and in the process makes clear that gender as a category of analysis is central to an understanding of the literary tradition, that an understanding of Lawrence illuminates the tradition of women's writing and is in turn illuminated by it. I have two cautions. The first I have already suggested: covering so much, Siegel also leaves a great deal unsaid. More importantly, however, Siegel's own affirmation of essentialism is undercut in her convincing demonstration that a consideration of Lawrence and women writers is mutually illuminating. Although Siegel draws on an impressive array of critical theorists, she does not finally resolve the essentialist dilemma. Lawrence Among the Women is, nevertheless, a major contribution to our understanding both of Lawrence and of feminist theory. Lydia Blanchard Center for Multicultural and Gender Studies Southwest Texas State University Two on Lawrence D. H. Lawrence's Literary Inheritors. Keith Cushman and Dennis Jackson , eds. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. χ + 287 pp. $45.00 D. H. Lawrence's Manuscripts: The Correspondence of Frieda Lawrence, Jake Zeitlin and Others. Michael Squires, ed. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. xii + 319pp. $35.00 IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS, St. Martin's Press, usually in conjunction with Macmillan (London), has published a number of critical and scholarly works about D. H. Lawrence, in itself a welcome recognition of Lawrence's importance in contemporary literary culture. Books such as Peter Balbert's D. H Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination (1989), a discerning exploration of the ideas of sexual identity that propel the fiction, John Worthen's new biographical account (1990), and Jeffrey Meyers's compilation of essays (one each by Meyers and six other contributors), The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence (1987), have helped demonstrate Lawrence's significance. Now, the two books here under review add, in ways very different from each other, further understanding of the influence of this complex literary and cultural figure. One of the 119 ELT 36:1 1993 current books, Keith Cushman and Dennis Jackson's edition of fourteen essays, D. H. Lawrence's Literary Inheritors, deepens and expands the focus of Jeffrey Meyers's earlier collection, a critical continuity that increasing consciousness of the subject can well sustain. In their knowledgeable and cautious introduction to the current volume, Cushman and Jackson point out how each of the fourteen essays directs attention to a specific example of Lawrentian influence. They reveal its susceptibility to different kinds of definition, its relationship to imitation, its constant suggestions of both identity and difference, and its dissemination through the literary culture at large. They recognize that although Harold Bloom, in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), strongly encouraged contemporary critical study of authors struggling against and absorbing their predecessors, others like Dr. Johnson and T. S. Eliot had earlier recognized strains and complexities of influence in the process of the transmission of ideas and values through the literary culture. They don't always regard conscious imitation as the way to define the transmission and alteration of ideas in the culture, as in one of the essays, by Cushman himself, in which he develops the striking similarities between Lawrence's story The Blind Man" and Raymond Carver's later story The Cathedral." After he convincingly shows parallels in plot and theme, Cushman produces a letter from Carver asserting that he had not read the Lawrence story when he wrote his own. Cushman goes on to demonstrate metaphorical similarities within the literary culture, using theories of both Kristeva and Barthes concerning intertextuality, to reach the conclusion that, while owing nothing to intentional or conscious influence, both similarities and differences show "how brilliantly [Carver] has rewritten Lawrence's story." Another fine essay by Bruce Clarke shows various ways in which William Carlos Williams consciously venerated, hated, used, and abandoned the voice of Lawrence's poems and travel essays in the...